Remember a time when legal blogging was blogging.
Lawyers penned law blogs to share information, insight and commentary to help others – lawyers and lay people – and advance the law. Legal blogs were real publications.
A byproduct of this style of blogging was a reputation and relationships, much the same as speaking and writing built for a lawyer, before the advent of the net.
Today, ask a lawyer in the States about a law blog, and they’re apt to assume you mean something a lawyer pays to have put on their website to get traffic to their website. The lawyer doesn’t write the blog.
As if traffic to a lawyer’s website is the panacea for getting clients when the leading way people find a lawyer is to ask a friend, relative or c0-worker.
Law blogs in the states, more for most lawyers – there are thousands of lawyers who know what a blog is and that only you as a lawyer can pen one – are like billboards.
Get one up on the side of the road for attention. All that’s required is money.
I spent part of Tuesday afternoon looking at legal blogs from Africa. Nothing led me to believe the law blogs I looked at were about web traffic, SEO and written by web marketing companies for lawyers.
The African law blogs were much like law blogs were in the United States. Written by legal authorities themselves – hundreds of them – sharing legal commentary, fostering discussion among the authorities, and bloggers looking to help legal professionals and people outside the profession.
I’m fairly certain Africa hasn’t yet seen the legal marketing companies pitching “content marketing” with blogs done for you as being what it takes to be a lawyer.
I can tell this by looking at the blogs, reading some of the posts and the about sections which explain what’s driving the blog and the bloggers.
Looking at legal blogs in the States eighteen years, I couldn’t imagine how lawyers could screw this one up, much as they already had in using the Internet for attention, versus engagement and publishing.
Most lawyers have screwed it up. Leaves international law blogs ahead – at least those I’ve seen from Africa.
With 30,000 legal bloggers, domestic and international, curating their blogs through LexBlog, I know the aggregate insightful and valuable U.S. legal commentary generated by blogs exceeds that of international legal blog commentary.
International law blogs just lack the polluted “law blogging” for marketing.